Charlie Four Whiskey

As I’ve been making my way through the veritable smörgåsbord of social media tools and technologies, trying to provide information on how and why you might use them as part of an integrated marketing and  communications strategies, I think I’ve been subconsciously leaving Twitter to the end.

It should be easy to describe, right? Just look at Wikipedia’s definition:

“Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default).”

As of yesterday, with the news that the accounts of 33 prominent Twitter users (including President-elect Barack Obama, Rick Sanchez, Britney Spears, Fox News) had been hacked, and “used to send malicious messages, many of them offensive”, many people are now asking themselves “what the $%#$%# is Twitter???”

Instead of doing my normal thing of trying to answer that question myself, I decided to do a controlled experiment and ask the following question (okay.. so the reality is that I’m still a little sluggish after the long Holiday …. repeat after me …. crowdsourcing is a good thing!):

Of all the social media tools and technologies, Twitter is probably the hardest one to give a 30 second ‘elevator pitch’ for. How do you explain the benefits of Twitter to others?

We’ve all been there. Someone has asked you to try and explain Twitter to them, and as you do your best, you see their eyes glaze over and a puzzled look cross their face.

A few (a very few) get it immediately, but most scratch or shake their heads and decide to change the subject.

If asked, how do you explain the benefits of Twitter to others, and what has been the response?

The controlled bit of the experiment is that I’m asking the same question in three different places (four places if you count this blog … please post your answer to the question as a comment), all of which are social media savvy, to a lesser or greater extent:

1) LinkedIn Answers
With 31 million + users on this leading social network, I’m interested to see just how far Twitter has infiltrated into the mainstream.

2) LinkedIn – Social Media Marketing group
At 8,278 members and growing rapidly, this is a subset of LinkedIn Members who have chosen to actively engage in a community of interest around social media marketing.

3) Triiibes.com
Seth Godin’s closed community of 3,921 “people who want to lead a tribe and make something happen”. I’m really interested in reading what this group has to say, as it is full of incredibly creative people who see all technologies as enablers to making things happen.

In a couple of days, I will be updating this post with what I’ve learned, so please do post your answer to the question, and then come back and see how others answered it.